On the wall in a Carol Stream gym is a chalk-dusted poster from the 2010 collegiate gymnastics championships. It features the photo of a young woman airborne, her dark brown eyes calm but intent, hands reaching for a bar inches beyond her fingertips.

She is Anna Li, who trains at the gym. Beginning Friday, Li, of Aurora, will be among 15 women gymnasts attempting to make the U.S. Olympic team. It is her one and only chance to be an Olympian, and she's a long shot.

By any measure, Li is an elite athlete among the estimated 74,000 young women who are competitive gymnasts in the U.S. After leading UCLA to the national collegiate championship in 2010, she was named to the U.S. team that won a world championship last year. Her uneven bar routines are among the best on the planet. And, having spent nearly 30,000 hours training and competing, Li has peaked at the right time — now.

But only five female gymnasts will be chosen to compete for the U.S. team in London.In the hypercompetitive, injury-prone women's gymnastics world, 16-year-old girls who stand 5 feet and weigh 100 pounds are the ideal.

At 23, Li is the second-oldest of the female gymnasts at the trials. She is 5 foot 4 and 118 pounds. Her history of cringe-inducing injuries includes two surgically repaired broken feet that each bear two metal pins, and her relative lack of versatility could diminish her chances.

Yet Li has surprised many, getting farther than she imagined a couple of years ago when — her competitive career seemingly over — she wore a ninja costume as a stuntwoman in Honda commercials and flipped from two stories through a moon roof.

Coached by her Olympic medalist parents, she has worked incredibly hard to get this close. Does she have enough to pull another surprise?

"I'm excited," Li said after a workout at Legacy Elite, the Carol Stream gym her parents own. A few strands of hair drooped over her forehead. Her manicured nails sparkled at the end of rough, chalk-ingrained hands.

"It was kind of like I squeezed myself through again" by getting invited to the Olympic trials, she said. "I proved a point."

Her last-ditch effort is motivated by curiosity and, indirectly, regret. At 13, Li started training at the highest rung in gymnastics — an estimated 50-hour-per-week grind necessary to compete at USA Gymnastics' Elite level. Colleges began to recruit her, which fit her goal of a scholarship, not the Olympics.

She ended up taking a full ride to UCLA and, although the school is a premier program, collegiate competition demands far fewer hours in the gym compared with Elite. After graduating in 2010 as a history major, Li performed onABC's"Make It or Break It,"which follows fictional teen Olympic hopefuls, in addition to the Honda commercials. But she no longer competed. She had lost her edge.

The notion of returning to the Elite level and perhaps making the Olympics nagged. She didn't want second thoughts creeping into her life.

So, Li started training as an Elite again, nearly a decade after the first time, and returned to Aurora. Her parents resumed coaching her.

"I just felt like it wasn't enough," she said of her gymnastics career. "I felt like I didn't do my best at Elite. So I felt like I might as well give it my all. I want to finish gymnastics without any regrets."

Wanted to quit

Li's baptism into gymnastics occurred at 17 days old, when her mother, Jiani Wu, a bronze medal winner for China in the 1984 Olympics, brought Anna to the Las Vegas gym where Jiani and her husband, Yuejiu Li, a silver medal winner for China in 1984, coached. The couple came to the U.S. around 1987.

She went to the gym every day with her parents, and her first memory of the place came at about age 4, when she saw older girls fitted for leotards and was dazzled. She asked her mother for one.

"You can't get one unless you compete," Jiani Wu told her daughter.

By the time Anna Li was 6, she was competing against girls years older in the Junior Olympic program. At 13 she decided to train as an Elite.

She was overwhelmed, and rebelled. Her parents clamped down harder, refusing to let her go to friends' sleepovers unless she had a productive day in the gym. To give them more time to focus on their daughter's training, the family left the Las Vegas gym they owned and became coaches in a Naperville gym.

During that time, Li remembered, her parents yelled at her in workouts, often followed by silent car rides home and silent dinners before she'd go to bed. She wanted to quit.

The atmosphere changed when her sister, Andrea, was born later that year. Joy spread through the family. Li's dread of training turned to enthusiastic drive, and that drive is perhaps her most notable trait, her parents and friends say.

Looking back, Li said, her plight was a necessary step to break into the Elite level. "But maybe I could have had a little more fun," she added.

Injury's toll

Li endures countless rolled ankles and has chronic pain in both shoulders. She had "cleanup" surgery on her right foot as a teenager and surgery to repair torn hip cartilage. When she was 14, doctors found three fractures in her back, fitted her for a body cast and recommended she give up gymnastics, she said.

Instead, Li focused on intense conditioning of her core muscles and carried on.

Then, in October, her push to the Olympic trials almost ended. She fractured a bone in her right foot and underwent surgery. Doctors planted two pins in the navicular bone — she'd had the same surgery on her left navicular in 2005 — and placed her in a non-weight-bearing cast until about February.

While in the cast, Li worked the rest of her body and returned to full gymnastics training after five months, about three months earlier than she'd returned after her first navicular surgery.

"You have to be tough at this level and not be afraid of injuries," Li said, smiling. "Sounds like fun, right?"

Research shows that from 1988 to 2004, gymnastics had the highest rate of practice-related injuries among all women's intercollegiate sports; that as many as 71 percent of female gymnasts train with an injury; and that re-injury rates are high.

Gymnasts at the most competitive levels suffer more injuries than those at lower levels, studies show, and injuries linger. Forty-five percent of previous injuries still produced symptoms after gymnasts left the sport, research indicates.

Like football players, elite gymnasts almost shrug about their sometimes startling injury history. They accept that serious and sometimes lasting damage to their bodies is a consequence of pursuing a sport they love.

Apart from grueling, stressful athletic demands, Li has had to deal with family turmoil. Her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and recently finished a round of chemotherapy. In April, Li's mother underwent a hysterectomy. One week later, she returned to the gym to coach her daughter.

For Li to be competing at this level "is superhuman," said Dennis Caine, a professor of physical education, exercise science and wellness at the University of North Dakota. He has been researching and writing about sports injuries for decades.

"There are always exceptions to the rule," Caine said of Li's prospects, "and there are girls who surprise everybody. She just may have that."

Silent disappointment

Li said she has dropped about 18 pounds since last year, while increasing her strength to train as an Elite. Her meals are mostly "protein and veggies," she added, joking that she's "pretty boring to eat with."

Her social life is nearly as humdrum. Li and her boyfriend, Brian DeBias, of Chicago, see each other about four times a week, mostly to watch TV at Li's apartment.

If she gets out of the gym early, Li drives to his softball games. Some days he visits the gym to watch her practice. She feels guilty about placing gymnastics above the relationship. DeBias accepts that "it's a totally understandable … dream of hers."

When she has productive days in the gym, Li will talk gymnastics in-depth with him, DeBias said. When she's had a rough day, he added, he'll ask about it to console her. She deflects the questions.

"If she's not doing things the way she thinks she should," said DeBias, a technician at ATI Physical Therapy in Lombard, "she's very hard on herself."

Being hard on herself is another Li trait, said Huneth Lor, her childhood friend. The two became as close as sisters when Lor, at age 9, moved to the Li house to train with her parents. Lor lived with the family for the next 12 years and earned a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Michigan.

Now an event planner in Chicago, Lor texts her friend every day. Sometimes they talk online for hours at night via Skype.

Li is "definitely optimistic," Lor said. But when Li gets discouraged, "I remind her of all her experiences, of her strengths. Her maturity is her edge. I tell her that she's come this far and that just one bump in the road isn't going to end it all."

During a workout last week, frustration and perhaps pressure got to Li. After failing to nail routines she had been practicing, she wept. Then Li went to the gym's fitness center, worked on cardio exercises, returned to the gym the next day and nailed the routines.

On Friday, parents at the gym gave her a cake and wished her well. On Monday, she boarded a plane for San Jose, Calif., to begin final workouts for the Olympic trials there.

'You never know'

Choosing the Olympic team is like assembling a puzzle. The three-member selection committee looks for the right mix of talent while keeping an eye on rival teams' strengths and weaknesses. As objective as the scoring system is supposed to be, subjectivity plays a role.

Li and her mom acknowledge that she is a long shot. She is more of a specialist than the others. But her strength — the uneven bars — is where the U.S. team is considered vulnerable. And the selection committee is expected to take three alternate team members who can step in if one of the top five suffers an injury.

She says she's happy, more relaxed than she expected, grateful for having made it to the trials. In the gym, people walk up and ask her how she's feeling, give her advice on what to eat. She says she's eager to get to San Jose.

"You never know," Li said when asked about her chances. She smiled, her eyes a little distant, her voice determined. "You just never really know."

She's always loved the challenge and sense of accomplishment that gymnastics presents — an athlete works to master skills, then keeps working up the ladder of more demanding skills. But she jokes that she'd like to take all the knowledge she has now about the sport and "jump back into my body then," when she was a teenager.

And, Li said she relishes people telling her she'll never accomplish a goal. Her friends and parents say that dismissal always has fueled her.

"You never want to tell Anna she can't do something," Lor said, "because she'll turn around, work her ass off and show you."